True, but while violins and fiddles may look alike, they have entirely different cultures -- the fiddle is a manly instrument, while the violin is for wussies who drink soy milk.;)
(Tho there is one rock musician who uses a *violin* to good advantage in his rock songs -- "Cynic Guru", who in his day job plays violin for the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra!)
This was a black Labrador. She lived with a group of 4 to 5 other females, both blacks and yellows. She picked out one yellow female, and regularly humped ONLY that particular dog so long as they lived together -- while ignoring all the others (some of whom would have been more than happy to hump and be humped -- female dogs are worse than teenage boys). After I gave her first lady-love to the Guide Dogs, she moped for about a year, then picked out another yellow kennelmate and daily humped the crap out of her, and no one else. She lived to be 14 and never changed her ways.
There are some social conventions among dogs (male or female) as to who is allowed to hump whom, but monogamy is extremely rare (tho is seen more in males than in females).
It's definitely not a human-only thing. Lots of animals exhibit homosexual behaviour, tho with a much higher proportion of females than males.
[pro dog breeder hat] I've had a bitch who was a monogamous lesbian, and she only liked other females of a certain colour. Pretty damned funny, actually:)
Upon RTFA'ing, I had similar thoughts. This appears to be yet another "find something to blame" game, where some special interest figures if they throw enough examples at the public, people will believe at least one of them, and that's the foot in the door to restrictive or punitive legislation.
IOW, their accusations were too broad, and neglected to recognise that if pollutants were really the "cause" here, the problem would have been much worse 50 or 100 years ago, when it was common practice to throw every sort of toxic waste into the nearest river, and there was no effort whatever to prevent the public from coming in contact with it. (Likewise for household and farm toxins.) Why didn't people then suffer these same effects??
Methinks the real issue here is a new generation of ill-fitted tinfoil hats, handily enabled by der interveb, and validated by crosstalk.
And speaking as a livestock person with several decades and multiple generations' experience -- I agree with you. Cultures, by way of what's valued in individuals, exert selection pressure for and against certain phenotypes, which in turn tends to promote or eliminate the associated genotypes. This is most obvious in dogs (and to a lesser degree, in other livestock), where various breeds WITH DIFFERING INSTINCTS developed in response to selection pressure for various functions -- which is to say, a directly applied form of "culture".
A human culture that valued stay-at-home moms and denigrated "working girls" might likewise select strongly for genes that produce a temperament of demure mothers who never let their kids out of their sight. Whereas a culture that valued (or required) working moms might select for a more-independent female that's more willing to dump the kids in daycare.
It only takes a few generations for such selection pressure to have a profound effect on the relevant part of the gene pool.
While I'm not fond of David Allen Coe, I gotta agree -- overproduced pop-slop ain't country. If it's got violins in the back-track, it ain't country. If it's got 40 eunuchs backing the chorus, it ain't country.
Come to think of it, I'd have to say the same thing about '70s pop-rock, including a lot of pop-metal!
Not officially. But in the form of mistresses, they still do.
Not that this is so different from the rest of the world! In fact, I'd say it's NOT having a mistress that is historically the anomaly. Marriage was typically first and foremost a business arrangement. You got married, then both husband and wife went on about their, um, affairs, because marriage was about money, but affairs were for love. This had even become somewhat formalized in some cultures (what? no mistress? He's weird.:)
Anecdote: flaxseed meal is increasingly used in pet food. When I was feeding my kennel a diet with a significant amount of flaxseed meal, I had a marked increase of certain types of birth defects (mainly some degree of failure of midline closure) AND a 50% miss rate on breedings. Since I've gone to a flax-free diet, the birth defects have gone away, and my conception rate is back to the species norm of 85-90%.
(Credential: I have almost 40 years professional experience in dogs.)
The article says no such thing. (I think your stat is a fraction of total causes of death.) It does say that whooping cough is the leading cause of death among unvaccinated infants, and "Pertussis is the only vaccine-preventable disease that is associated with increasing deaths in the U.S." (Gee, I wonder if that has anything to do with the decreasing level of vaccination!)
BTW, one of the risks with the bordatellas is secondary pneumonia. And the antibiotics used to mitigate bordatella tend to induce nausea unless taken in multiple small doses, with food. Not a good scenario in a small child.
I hereby award you the "Slashdot nitpicker of the day" medal of honour:)
And I'd say I didn't have a fallacy in the first place, but rather that I'd failed to state one of the conditions of the scenario, even tho I took it into consideration. So there!:D
(The "Slashdot award for quick and dirty proofs"? Why, thank you!:)
Your link is bad either way. But consider that if every child came down with whooping cough, and if even half needed hospitalization, we'd soon be in big trouble (much as we were before modern hospitals). Remove modern hospitalization from the equation, which happens for a lot of people when the system gets overloaded, and watch what happens.
No thanks, I'll take the exceedingly small risk of vaccine, and thereby also learn whether the vaccinate has a normal immune system. Because an abnormal immune system is quite likely to have other issues... interestingly, per one of the research links someone else posted, measles vaccine is strongly associated with a LOWER risk of asthma -- because vaccine, being the right level of exposure to stimulate but not stress the immune system, leads to better coping in general -- hence less asthma.
Not really, because it only takes one case to generate an epidemic among unvaccinated subjects. So the very low odds of catching it in the first place only apply to the first case.
In a given population, about 85% must be vaccinated to achieve a "herd immunity" effect for unvaccinates (that is, a *lack of opportunity to be exposed* to active disease). But when the vaccinates drop below about 85%, you have conditions conducive to an epidemic.
So yes, the very occasional unvaccinate is not really at risk. However, if they become the norm, then the risk of infective exposure becomes very high, and the associated risk of death becomes everyone's problem, rather than a rare few's problem.
We have already seen this principle at work with several localized lepto epidemics since vaccinating dogs against lepto fell out of favour due to fear of imaginary "reactions" -- and lepto had previously been pretty well vaccinated out of existence.
Not only that, but mercury was mostly phased out of vaccines 30 to 40 years ago. And what little is left is not nearly what you'd get from, say, eating a single can of tuna.
What amazes me is their complete inability to compare risk factors (tho this is much the same as Schneier talks about re perceived risk).
Chances of a mild reaction to whooping cough vaccine runs somewhere around 1 in 10,000, with the chance of a fatal reaction about 1 in 1 million (but in that case, the child's immune system is a bomb waiting to go off, and sooner or later something will get 'em).
Chances of death if the child contracts whooping cough: about 1 in 4 with modern hospitalization, or 1 in 2 without.
To me, that's a no-brainer.
The same bullshit is permeating the dog breeder community too -- "Vaccinosis" is now blamed for everything that can possibly go wrong! How about not breeding animals whose immune systems can't handle the trivial stimulation of a vaccine? And if they can't handle vaccine, how on earth are they expected to handle a realworld exposure, at hundreds or thousands of times the strength of vaccine??
I found that I got the realworld awareness boost in tandem with the point where I really got good at DOOM, and could take on just about any map from a pistol start. I'd abruptly put together effective strafing and effectively-aggressive play, and changed my whole style from snipe-and-retreat to "turn everyone loose at once and run around the melee making them kill each other". Well, you can't survive that if you're not aware of stuff incoming from the sides! And I noticed how I was suddenly more aware (it was quite definite) of stuff to either side while driving, too -- yeah, having myself grown up in deer country, I've always been big on peering in both directions, but now it was more all of a piece without having to do so much actual looking. And since I'd been driving for over 20 years at the time, it wasn't just some big leap in my driving experience.
Anyway, it's useful, and BTW I still kill a few hellspawn every day:)
Very interesting about the bad sectors clustering around the partition table -- might be indicative of head crashing, especially if the bad spots tended to grow. In my experience, heat buildup tends more toward random bad sectors all over the disk (similar to what power spikes do).
That marketing "repurposed" the poorly-designed disks seems possible... what I do wonder is how anyone *could* design a truly DUD hard disk when there's 20 years of mature tech to draw on, and AFAIK the Deskstars weren't anything groundbreaking -- other than using glass platters, or so I've understood 'em to be -- I know of a couple cases where the platter BROKE during ordinary use. Tempered glass will stand a lot of heating and cooling, but it WON'T stand up to repeated small direct impacts -- like a head crash. I'd expect that would cause small fractures on the surface.
Using laptop drives is an interesting solution:) Not near enough disk space for the buck for me, tho I ought to put one in my Luggable (laptop? what's that??:) as they're less shockable than regular HDs.
My own approach to HD cooling: I always leave a vacant drive bay, or at least half an inch of space between drives, and try to have a fan blowing across or between 'em too. I like those bottom-mounted double fans, tho they won't fit in my Raidmax cases due to the shape of the drive mounts -- OTOH I like Raidmax for having 10+ drive bays AND for ensuring sufficient vent space between each HD, plus the side fan is well placed for cooling the HDs.
Separate HD is usually better, yep -- tho sometimes there's nowhere to install one (frex, crappy OEM machines with only one HD mount, or without adequate cooling**). Also, if your only choice in a second HD is one that's significantly slower than the main HD, that's not progress, performance-wise. Reduced wear-and-tear, tho, is probably a good point.
I remember the "DeathStar" HDs (glass platters?? What were they thinking?!) but wasn't aware they were meant as streaming-media-only drives -- who on earth did that, in that timeframe?? IBM must have been on bad drugs that week.
(** Someone gift me a Dell that chronically overheated. I gave the poor thing the standard cooling that any cheap clone has, and its temp dropped *40*F degrees!!)
I disconnect from the FPS readily enough (I don't do the real-life behaviours you mention, when not playing) BUT... DOOM made me much more *aware* of what's in my Real Life encounter-space, especially when driving. So it's been quite beneficial in the real world.
But yeah, I think they've just rediscovered what we already knew:) OTOH now maybe they'll see some benefit to it, like I already have:)
Oh, I agree entirely -- I've even found myself leaning toward the home team's goalpost while watching football on TV. All it takes is involvement, and the body starts to follow the brain's desire. FPS's, and what these researchers are doing, just take it another step... I suppose the equivalent of watching the football game via helmetcam.
Slashdot Mirror
That was my point :)
True, but while violins and fiddles may look alike, they have entirely different cultures -- the fiddle is a manly instrument, while the violin is for wussies who drink soy milk. ;)
(Tho there is one rock musician who uses a *violin* to good advantage in his rock songs -- "Cynic Guru", who in his day job plays violin for the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra!)
Yes. One at a TIME, but several *serially*.
This was a black Labrador. She lived with a group of 4 to 5 other females, both blacks and yellows. She picked out one yellow female, and regularly humped ONLY that particular dog so long as they lived together -- while ignoring all the others (some of whom would have been more than happy to hump and be humped -- female dogs are worse than teenage boys). After I gave her first lady-love to the Guide Dogs, she moped for about a year, then picked out another yellow kennelmate and daily humped the crap out of her, and no one else. She lived to be 14 and never changed her ways.
There are some social conventions among dogs (male or female) as to who is allowed to hump whom, but monogamy is extremely rare (tho is seen more in males than in females).
You're welcome. Now get busy and clean my monitor! ;)
It's definitely not a human-only thing. Lots of animals exhibit homosexual behaviour, tho with a much higher proportion of females than males.
[pro dog breeder hat] I've had a bitch who was a monogamous lesbian, and she only liked other females of a certain colour. Pretty damned funny, actually :)
Upon RTFA'ing, I had similar thoughts. This appears to be yet another "find something to blame" game, where some special interest figures if they throw enough examples at the public, people will believe at least one of them, and that's the foot in the door to restrictive or punitive legislation.
IOW, their accusations were too broad, and neglected to recognise that if pollutants were really the "cause" here, the problem would have been much worse 50 or 100 years ago, when it was common practice to throw every sort of toxic waste into the nearest river, and there was no effort whatever to prevent the public from coming in contact with it. (Likewise for household and farm toxins.) Why didn't people then suffer these same effects??
Methinks the real issue here is a new generation of ill-fitted tinfoil hats, handily enabled by der interveb, and validated by crosstalk.
And speaking as a livestock person with several decades and multiple generations' experience -- I agree with you. Cultures, by way of what's valued in individuals, exert selection pressure for and against certain phenotypes, which in turn tends to promote or eliminate the associated genotypes. This is most obvious in dogs (and to a lesser degree, in other livestock), where various breeds WITH DIFFERING INSTINCTS developed in response to selection pressure for various functions -- which is to say, a directly applied form of "culture".
A human culture that valued stay-at-home moms and denigrated "working girls" might likewise select strongly for genes that produce a temperament of demure mothers who never let their kids out of their sight. Whereas a culture that valued (or required) working moms might select for a more-independent female that's more willing to dump the kids in daycare.
It only takes a few generations for such selection pressure to have a profound effect on the relevant part of the gene pool.
While I'm not fond of David Allen Coe, I gotta agree -- overproduced pop-slop ain't country. If it's got violins in the back-track, it ain't country. If it's got 40 eunuchs backing the chorus, it ain't country.
Come to think of it, I'd have to say the same thing about '70s pop-rock, including a lot of pop-metal!
Does that mean if suddenly the population is all female, there will be an end to computers??
I suggest you check out this good site on the issues with phytoestrogens and male feminization:
http://www.soyonlineservice.co.nz/04malehealth.htm
Flaxseed meal has about twice the phytoestrogens that soy does. You've Been Warned.
Not officially. But in the form of mistresses, they still do.
Not that this is so different from the rest of the world! In fact, I'd say it's NOT having a mistress that is historically the anomaly. Marriage was typically first and foremost a business arrangement. You got married, then both husband and wife went on about their, um, affairs, because marriage was about money, but affairs were for love. This had even become somewhat formalized in some cultures (what? no mistress? He's weird. :)
Look at phytoestrogens instead. The most common sources are soy products and flaxseed meal (which has about twice as much as soy does).
http://www.soyonlineservice.co.nz/04phytoestrogens.htm
http://www.soyonlineservice.co.nz/articles/phyto1.htm
Anecdote: flaxseed meal is increasingly used in pet food. When I was feeding my kennel a diet with a significant amount of flaxseed meal, I had a marked increase of certain types of birth defects (mainly some degree of failure of midline closure) AND a 50% miss rate on breedings. Since I've gone to a flax-free diet, the birth defects have gone away, and my conception rate is back to the species norm of 85-90%.
(Credential: I have almost 40 years professional experience in dogs.)
The article says no such thing. (I think your stat is a fraction of total causes of death.) It does say that whooping cough is the leading cause of death among unvaccinated infants, and "Pertussis is the only vaccine-preventable disease that is associated with increasing deaths in the U.S." (Gee, I wonder if that has anything to do with the decreasing level of vaccination!)
BTW, one of the risks with the bordatellas is secondary pneumonia. And the antibiotics used to mitigate bordatella tend to induce nausea unless taken in multiple small doses, with food. Not a good scenario in a small child.
I hereby award you the "Slashdot nitpicker of the day" medal of honour :)
And I'd say I didn't have a fallacy in the first place, but rather that I'd failed to state one of the conditions of the scenario, even tho I took it into consideration. So there! :D
(The "Slashdot award for quick and dirty proofs"? Why, thank you! :)
Your link is bad either way. But consider that if every child came down with whooping cough, and if even half needed hospitalization, we'd soon be in big trouble (much as we were before modern hospitals). Remove modern hospitalization from the equation, which happens for a lot of people when the system gets overloaded, and watch what happens.
No thanks, I'll take the exceedingly small risk of vaccine, and thereby also learn whether the vaccinate has a normal immune system. Because an abnormal immune system is quite likely to have other issues... interestingly, per one of the research links someone else posted, measles vaccine is strongly associated with a LOWER risk of asthma -- because vaccine, being the right level of exposure to stimulate but not stress the immune system, leads to better coping in general -- hence less asthma.
Not really, because it only takes one case to generate an epidemic among unvaccinated subjects. So the very low odds of catching it in the first place only apply to the first case.
In a given population, about 85% must be vaccinated to achieve a "herd immunity" effect for unvaccinates (that is, a *lack of opportunity to be exposed* to active disease). But when the vaccinates drop below about 85%, you have conditions conducive to an epidemic.
So yes, the very occasional unvaccinate is not really at risk. However, if they become the norm, then the risk of infective exposure becomes very high, and the associated risk of death becomes everyone's problem, rather than a rare few's problem.
We have already seen this principle at work with several localized lepto epidemics since vaccinating dogs against lepto fell out of favour due to fear of imaginary "reactions" -- and lepto had previously been pretty well vaccinated out of existence.
And you risk an adverse reaction every time you take aspirin, eat strawberries, or sniff a flower. Where are the warning labels on flowers?? ;)
Not only that, but mercury was mostly phased out of vaccines 30 to 40 years ago. And what little is left is not nearly what you'd get from, say, eating a single can of tuna.
What amazes me is their complete inability to compare risk factors (tho this is much the same as Schneier talks about re perceived risk).
Chances of a mild reaction to whooping cough vaccine runs somewhere around 1 in 10,000, with the chance of a fatal reaction about 1 in 1 million (but in that case, the child's immune system is a bomb waiting to go off, and sooner or later something will get 'em).
Chances of death if the child contracts whooping cough: about 1 in 4 with modern hospitalization, or 1 in 2 without.
To me, that's a no-brainer.
The same bullshit is permeating the dog breeder community too -- "Vaccinosis" is now blamed for everything that can possibly go wrong! How about not breeding animals whose immune systems can't handle the trivial stimulation of a vaccine? And if they can't handle vaccine, how on earth are they expected to handle a realworld exposure, at hundreds or thousands of times the strength of vaccine??
I found that I got the realworld awareness boost in tandem with the point where I really got good at DOOM, and could take on just about any map from a pistol start. I'd abruptly put together effective strafing and effectively-aggressive play, and changed my whole style from snipe-and-retreat to "turn everyone loose at once and run around the melee making them kill each other". Well, you can't survive that if you're not aware of stuff incoming from the sides! And I noticed how I was suddenly more aware (it was quite definite) of stuff to either side while driving, too -- yeah, having myself grown up in deer country, I've always been big on peering in both directions, but now it was more all of a piece without having to do so much actual looking. And since I'd been driving for over 20 years at the time, it wasn't just some big leap in my driving experience.
Anyway, it's useful, and BTW I still kill a few hellspawn every day :)
Very interesting about the bad sectors clustering around the partition table -- might be indicative of head crashing, especially if the bad spots tended to grow. In my experience, heat buildup tends more toward random bad sectors all over the disk (similar to what power spikes do).
That marketing "repurposed" the poorly-designed disks seems possible... what I do wonder is how anyone *could* design a truly DUD hard disk when there's 20 years of mature tech to draw on, and AFAIK the Deskstars weren't anything groundbreaking -- other than using glass platters, or so I've understood 'em to be -- I know of a couple cases where the platter BROKE during ordinary use. Tempered glass will stand a lot of heating and cooling, but it WON'T stand up to repeated small direct impacts -- like a head crash. I'd expect that would cause small fractures on the surface.
Using laptop drives is an interesting solution :) Not near enough disk space for the buck for me, tho I ought to put one in my Luggable (laptop? what's that?? :) as they're less shockable than regular HDs.
My own approach to HD cooling: I always leave a vacant drive bay, or at least half an inch of space between drives, and try to have a fan blowing across or between 'em too. I like those bottom-mounted double fans, tho they won't fit in my Raidmax cases due to the shape of the drive mounts -- OTOH I like Raidmax for having 10+ drive bays AND for ensuring sufficient vent space between each HD, plus the side fan is well placed for cooling the HDs.
Separate HD is usually better, yep -- tho sometimes there's nowhere to install one (frex, crappy OEM machines with only one HD mount, or without adequate cooling**). Also, if your only choice in a second HD is one that's significantly slower than the main HD, that's not progress, performance-wise. Reduced wear-and-tear, tho, is probably a good point.
I remember the "DeathStar" HDs (glass platters?? What were they thinking?!) but wasn't aware they were meant as streaming-media-only drives -- who on earth did that, in that timeframe?? IBM must have been on bad drugs that week.
(** Someone gift me a Dell that chronically overheated. I gave the poor thing the standard cooling that any cheap clone has, and its temp dropped *40*F degrees!!)
I disconnect from the FPS readily enough (I don't do the real-life behaviours you mention, when not playing) BUT... DOOM made me much more *aware* of what's in my Real Life encounter-space, especially when driving. So it's been quite beneficial in the real world.
But yeah, I think they've just rediscovered what we already knew :) OTOH now maybe they'll see some benefit to it, like I already have :)
Oh, I agree entirely -- I've even found myself leaning toward the home team's goalpost while watching football on TV. All it takes is involvement, and the body starts to follow the brain's desire. FPS's, and what these researchers are doing, just take it another step... I suppose the equivalent of watching the football game via helmetcam.
Great, you made my avatar spit on my monitor! :D